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DevRel “Dream Team”—How we Empower Camunda Users

Get to know the DevRel team at Camunda. How can we empower you?
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Community has always been a driving force in what we do here at Camunda, from implementing your product feedback to creating content that helps you onboard quickly. When the Developer Relations team was first created in 2019, our primary goal was to ensure that every technical user of the product felt supported and valued, whether they were brand new to BPMN concepts or one of our most experienced contributors.

Five years later, this goal continues to drive everything we do. With new team members joining us, it’s the perfect time to reintroduce ourselves and share our vision. As our team and community have grown, we’re excited to keep fostering a space where knowledge, collaboration, and innovation thrive!

Our community vision

Our vision for the community is simple: it’s all about you, our passionate Camunda users. You’re dedicated to process orchestration excellence and eager to share your insights! Your feedback helps us create a better experience, and the knowledge you share with fellow users helps everyone gain more value.

By creating platforms for you to ask questions, discuss best practices, suggest feedback, and share community-maintained extensions, we connect you to other community members, enhancing the collective learning and growth.

The community programs launched in the last few years, including Champions, Educational License Program and so many more, have empowered you with additional resources, conversations with other Camundi, and early access to product features.

What does this mean on a practical level? For 2024, we’re focused on three key areas:

  • Technical Awareness – Through videos, blog posts, talks, and sample code, we aim to help the broader technical community understand process orchestration and the problems it can solve for them.
  • User Enablement – Our goal is to help you succeed with Camunda through community platforms, programs, and technical content. We also often support you in creating your own content or helping your fellow community members in the forum!
  • Community Growth – While focusing on those of you who are already engaged with us through meet-ups, forum posts, and code contributions (hi!), we also want to attract new community members so that we can all benefit from greater collective knowledge about process orchestration.

The journey so far

Over the past five years, our community has grown and transformed. We’ve expanded, iterated on, and launched various platforms and programs to better support and connect Camunda users. Our forum has become a hub for troubleshooting and sharing knowledge, while our volunteer-run meet-ups continue to offer opportunities to learn and network.

With a little bit of structure and a clear goal, we’ve been able to partner with you to bring even more programs into existence. Here are a few highlights:

  • With Camunda’s German roots, we couldn’t overlook Hacktoberfest and its play on words for Oktoberfest. We first participated in October 2020 and have received amazing community contributions to our core products as well as community-maintained repositories ever since.
  • January 2021 brought the announcement of Camunda for Common Good, one of Camunda’s philanthropic programs. Qualifying NGOs and nonprofits benefit from access to an enterprise license completely free of charge in an effort to further their mission.
  • Our first public commits to the Camunda Community Hub were in March 2021. This GitHub organization collects community-maintained repos in a single place, allowing for easier access to tools that can get you up and running more quickly.
  • In April 2021 we hosted our very first Community Summit, geared specifically toward developers, enterprise architects, and process automation experts. We introduced the idea of an “unconference” which was incredibly well-received and has continued to be a part of our in-person CamundaCon events. Join us in NYC in October to participate in the next one!
  • The Camunda Champion Program, which supports our most engaged community members, was launched in June 2021. To date, we’ve welcomed 47 different Champions to the program, many of whom have renewed their Champion status every year. Interested in joining this exclusive group? We’re preparing to open applications for our sixth cohort in August!
  • Our Community Values were launched with the help of our Camunda Champions in November 2022. These values have become a “north star” for the programs we run and the platforms we oversee, ensuring we continue to be transparent and accountable for our actions, and orchestrate with heart.
  • While we’ve been giving guest lectures at universities for years, the Educational License Program was made official in January 2023. Through this program, we give special access to Camunda for university professors who want to teach BPMN or Camunda in their class, or graduate students who want to use Camunda for their thesis. To date, we’ve worked with more than 90 universities from 25 different countries and supported over 750 students!
  • In May 2023, Senior Developer Advocate Niall Deehan recognized we needed a more formalized internal feedback loop to pass along all of the wonderful feedback you give us. With a few rounds of iteration, he came up with a simple process that has resulted in more than 80 pieces of feedback handed over to the product management team alone in the past year. Even more exciting, over 50% of those items have made significant progress through the roadmap!
  • The Orchestration Hour was created in May 2023 to give us a more interactive way to test out ideas, try new Camunda features, and learn out loud with all of you. We’re exploring new ideas for segments, like the recent “BPMN Battle” episode, so let us know what you want to see!
  • We partnered with Marketing to re-launch the much anticipated Camunda Community Podcast in July 2023, interviewing Camunda Engineers and Product Managers in addition to community members to learn all the best tips and tricks.
  • The Camunda forum has been around since 2016, providing a place for Camunda users to have discussions, offer feedback, and troubleshoot issues. Throughout 2023, we consolidated and cleaned up the categories and tags in the forum to make it easier to navigate and find the answers you’re looking for.
  • We published our first Community Impact Report in January 2024, looking back on an amazing year of contributions, collaborations, content, and more.
  • Through all of these additional platforms and programs, we’ve maintained our Camunda meet-up program, now renamed Camunda Chapters. As of July 2024, we have 36 active chapters across 19 countries, all run by amazing volunteers (thank you!).
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We continue to produce a wide range of content in various formats. Whether you prefer YouTube videos, blog posts, podcast episodes, sample code, or in-person events, we’ve got you covered!

In the future, we have dreams of expanding the Champion program to include “internal Champions” – folks who contribute heavily to their organization’s success with Camunda but aren’t creating as much external content, creating a guest blogging program for you to share your process orchestration stories, and so much more!

The “Dream Team” behind the Camunda Community

I have the pleasure of leading an absolute dream team of individuals who are making our community vision a reality! Our team of Developer Advocates focuses on technical content for both developers who use and maintain Camunda instances and Enterprise Architects who guide the technical decisions behind a company’s digital transformation.

We also formed a strong community-focused team responsible for enhancing contributor experiences and managing community programs. They also track behind-the-scenes metrics so we can better understand what resources would be useful for you in the future.

Danielle Andrist – Community Growth Manager
Joined in March 2020. Data explorer, organization junkie, reformatting fanatic, bad joke teller.
Jacob Plicque – Senior Developer Advocate
Joined in June 2024. Storyteller, loud ridiculous hype-man, doggo dad, dice dragon.
Maria Alcantara – Senior Community Manager
Joined in July 2021. Modern nomad, enthusiastic runner, yogi, climber, artist, and passionate creator of communities.
Mary Thengvall – Director of Developer Relations
Joined in December 2019. Lover of dogs, cheese, live music, community gatherings, and living in the mountains.
Mia Moore – Senior Technical Community Builder
Joined in June 2022. Big fan of birds, vegan food, and video games.
Nathan Loding – Developer Advocate
Joined in January 2023. Technologist and problem solver, sometimes gardener, and Oreo enthusiast. Known to wear balloon hats in public.
Niall Deehan – Senior Developer Advocate
Joined in April 2015. Maker of tutorials, teller of stories, keeper of secrets, and builder of unmaintainable example projects.
Samantha Holstine – Developer Advocate
Joined in September 2023. Dancing and rowing enthusiast, corgi mom, foodie, nature junkie.

Feedback welcome!

Above all else, we are motivated to do work that makes a difference for you! While we draw conclusions from forum themes, popular features, and one-on-one conversations, we’d love even more feedback.

  • What questions can we answer?
  • What resources are you looking for?
  • What problems are you trying to solve?
  • What features would you like to see?

Our goal is to empower you to do your best work. Head to the forum to let us know how we can help!

—Mary, on behalf of the DevRel Dream Team

Start the discussion at forum.camunda.io

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